[wand3r]

Yes, this is a very weird development for a millennial like me. I think this is a GenZ/Gen Alpha thing born out of steep surveillance enforced by the policies of streaming services chatrooms and TikTok. It really seems like the younger generation has really kowtoked to advertisers and self censor words I would consider benign. It honestly disgusts me.

[smcin]

Not necessarily, it's desirable for articles to be accessible from work and corporate firewalls, and lists of banned words exist. This was already the case before streaming services or TikTok existed.

[bji9jhff]

I think the existence of a corporate firewall filtering words like "porn", or any word actually, is part of the steep surveillance he's talking about.

[smcin]

I understood what he claimed, but it's neither a GenZ/Gen Alpha thing, nor did it start with streaming services or TikTok.

[delfinom]

Too bad the self censoring is really making censoring harder.

I love that "pdf file" is used in place of pedophile.

[roncesvalles]

Late GenZ and GenA censorship is to substitute the word entirely -- porn is "corn", dead is "unalive", ass becomes "ahh", sex worker is "accountant".

Asterisking is old-fashioned.

[dragonwriter]

Those are, as I undersand, mostly TikTok-isms (designed around actual and perceived TikTok censorship) more than generational patterns that have escaped (but somewhat attenuated) to other contexts ("unalive" is particularly common in other social media, the rest not so much.)

[tbrownaw]

> sex worker is "accountant"

The others are understandable enough, but what's up with this one?

[dragonwriter]

Its substituting a job you can't talk about without risking repercussions on some platforms with one you can. I don't think its a lot deeper than that, and that the substitution is essentially arbitrary (though I do think it was chosen because it has an extreme opposite social valence, with accountant being among the jobs with the most laced-up, boring, vanilla perception available.)

[smcin]

Punctuation, numbers-for-letters (L337) and strategic misspellings are also your friend.